Politics of the Audience

From my place in the crowd it seemed to me that what many people in the crowd wanted was recognition that they too are a collective, that they too constitute a “movement,” that there are other people in the country who think like they do and want what they want and that all such people might get together and work to make things happen. They’re people who believe alternatives to what exists are possible and necessary, and want someone to show them where to go to start to get it. But Stewart’s supposed call for civility and “reasonableness” is completely orthogonal to that drive, if not actively destructive of it—and the Rally to Restore Sanity a basically pointless, poorly executed exercise in self-promotion that is already completely forgotten.

It’s as if the entire Obama campaign and presidency happened again, only in miniature, in the span of a single afternoon.

Commonplace observation on ideology #24509: If you say the wrong thing, you have to fight just to be heard. If you say the right thing, you can be famous before you’ve even had a chance to hear yourself speak.